Every major AI model,
actually explained

OpenAI's current flagship family is GPT-5.6, which was released publicly on July 9, 2026 across ChatGPT, the API, and Codex as three models: Sol, the frontier flagship for complex reasoning, coding, and long-horizon agentic work; Terra, the balanced everyday model; and Luna, the fastest and cheapest tier built for high-volume workloads. It followed a limited preview that began on June 26, 2026 for a small group of trusted partners, with access confined to the API, Codex, or both. All three models share the same core specs: a 1 million token context window, 128,000 maximum output tokens, and a February 2026 knowledge cutoff. In practice, eligible paid plans access GPT-5.6 Sol through ChatGPT's reasoning settings while GPT-5.5 Instant remains the default for everyday chat, and Terra and Luna are available in Work, Codex, and the API depending on the product and plan. API pricing runs from $5 input / $30 output per million tokens for Sol, $2.50 / $15 for Terra, and $1 / $6 for Luna.

Claude is Anthropic's family of AI models, spanning the flagship Fable 5, the Opus 4.8 reasoning tier, and the faster Sonnet and Haiku variants. As of July 21, 2026, Claude Fable 5 is available globally after US export controls imposed on June 12 were lifted on June 30 and access was restored on July 1; Anthropic describes it as its most capable widely released model, sitting above the Opus tier. Claude is widely used for complex reasoning, coding, and long-form writing, with a context window of up to 1 million tokens on its Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 5 models at flat per-token pricing (Haiku 4.5 supports 200,000 tokens).

Gemini is Google DeepMind's family of multimodal AI models, spanning the fast, efficient Gemini 3.5 Flash, the higher-intelligence Gemini 3.1 Pro, and the ultra-cheap Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite. Gemini 3.5 Flash offers a 1 million–token context window and is optimized for high-throughput coding and agentic ("tool-using") workflows, scoring 55 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index while running faster than most models in its intelligence tier. It is a strong pick for high-volume, multi-step tasks like document processing, research assistants, and automated workflows where speed and cost matter as much as raw capability.

Grok is xAI's family of models, with Grok 4.5 as the current flagship since its July 8, 2026 release — a coding- and agent-focused model with a 500K-token context window, priced at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output. Below it sit Grok 4.3, the lower-cost 1M-context tier launched in April 2026, and Grok 4.1 Fast, a budget, high-throughput option with a 2M-token window. Grok's defining feature is real-time access to X, making it a strong choice for questions that depend on the latest public conversation rather than a static training cutoff.

Meta's Llama 4 family remains the most widely deployed open-weight AI ecosystem. Llama 4 Maverick is a natively multimodal Mixture-of-Experts model with a 1-million-token context window. Llama 4 Scout offers the same multimodal capability with a 10-million-token context window — the largest of any openly available model. Llama 3.3 70B remains a widely-deployed practical text-only option. In April 2026, Meta Superintelligence Labs launched a new proprietary model, Muse Spark, as the engine behind Meta AI — a strategic pivot away from Llama as Meta's frontier effort, though existing Llama models remain open and available for self-hosting via Ollama, Hugging Face, and every major inference framework.

As of July 2026, the current model in this family is Muse Spark 1.1, which Meta released on July 9, 2026 as its second Meta Superintelligence Labs model and a significant upgrade over the original Muse Spark from April. It is a multimodal reasoning model built for agentic tasks, with a 1-million-token context window and gains in tool use, computer use, coding, and multimodal understanding, and now runs in "Thinking" mode inside the Meta AI app and at meta.ai. On the same day, Meta opened a public preview of the new Meta Model API — a self-serve, US-only developer preview priced at $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens, with $20 in free credits for new accounts.

DeepSeek's January 2025 release of R1 shocked the AI industry by matching OpenAI o1's reasoning benchmark performance at a fraction of the training cost of Western frontier labs. DeepSeek V4 Pro is the current flagship, a Mixture of Experts model achieving frontier-competitive reasoning scores at dramatically lower inference cost than closed alternatives. DeepSeek V4 Flash trades some capability for speed and even lower cost. Both are available as open weights and via the DeepSeek API.

Qwen is Alibaba's family of large language models. Its current flagship is Qwen3.8-Max, previewed on July 19, 2026 as a 2.4-trillion-parameter multimodal (text, image, video, document) sparse Mixture-of-Experts model , which Alibaba claims performs "second only to Fable 5" — though that claim shipped with no benchmark table, no model card, no license, and no active-parameter count, and nobody outside Alibaba can run it yet, so "open-weight" is a promise rather than a download. Below it sit the proprietary, API-only Qwen3.7-Max, formally announced at the Alibaba Cloud Summit in May 2026 and text-only , and Qwen 3.7 Plus, a low-cost multimodal sibling that adds vision and video and lists at roughly one-sixth the per-token price of Qwen 3.7 Max , both carrying a 1M-token context window. Note that Qwen 3.7-Max is not open source and not open-weight — you cannot download it or run it on your own GPUs ; if you specifically want to self-host, the genuinely open line is the earlier Qwen3.6 family, which remains a solid free option for cost-sensitive work.

Kimi K3, launched July 16, 2026, is Moonshot AI's current flagship and the successor to the entire Kimi K2 family (K2, K2.5, K2.6, and K2.7 Code). It is a roughly 2.8-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with a 1-million-token context window, native vision, and always-on reasoning, positioned as the largest open-weight model released to date. Its standout use case is long-horizon work — coding across full codebases, analyzing large document sets, and running multi-step agent tasks — with two variants at launch, K3 Max for chat and agents and K3 Swarm Max for large-scale parallel processing.

Mistral AI, founded in France in 2023, has shipped a rapid succession of releases through 2026. Mistral Medium 3.5 is the newest, a 128-billion-parameter dense model released as open weights and now the default in Mistral's own Vibe and Le Chat tools. Mistral Large 3 remains the largest model in the lineup, a Mixture-of-Experts model released under Apache 2.0. Mistral Small 4 unifies the company's previously separate reasoning, multimodal, and coding models into a single configurable model. Mistral is a strong advocate for open-source AI and European digital sovereignty. Models are available via the Mistral API or as open weights for local deployment.